Free Night Soul and Other Stories by Joseph McElroy Page B

are none.” “That’s a relief,” she said, attending to her needles (pelvis points not quite right for Kidney Meridian, he thought).
    She’d forgotten and gone to answer the phone and something had changed. She was angry and this irritated her patient. No, it had never occurred to him, he said, fumbling over to her the mirror, closing his eyes—“but there are no pure interruptions.” “Your work,” she tried to say something, “your passion.” He could tell with his eyes closed as he felt a needle in his foot turn that she was trying (but why now?) to speak of him: “Aren’t you all about…?”
    “Why does he call when I’m here?”
    “At least it’s not one of those three-in-the morning jobs,” she said. Coarse for her.
    Unlike her. Even a breach of something, but what? Keeping things separate. She hadn’t denied that it was him. But could the person know who was here? She had heard her caller in the phone ring. That was it.
    The one who had fired her was what Xides suspected.
    “No interruption,” he murmured, surprised. “Well, that’s one thing I’ve gotten out of this…what’s going on inside,” he said. “Cities that can access each of us?” she said, persisting.
    “If we used what we had. Our materials.”
    “Materials?” she said, fine-tuning a needle. “Cities,” she said. What was she doing? What was between them? “Yes, cities that can access—” (she had heard it somewhere)—
    “I don’t love hearing myself.”
    “People know who you are,” she said.
    “But not what , God help me.” He was talking. What cities did she like?
    She had a friend in Boston.
    Xides had an idea, he told her, he needed to go back to where he’d had it first—something that needed a new material to build though it had been around a long time. An idea? she said. He despaired of it. What was the idea? she said. Yes, exactly, he said. “And someone takes what you thought up,” he said—changing the subject, seeing maybe vertigo was what the mirror had given him upside down—
    “And turns it into something,” she said.
    A schoolboy on a plane from Mozambique to Durban he would tell her about sometime, he said, whether he trusted her or not, he added meanly.
    Me ?
    He’d said too much. A spasm in his being, he’d betrayed his own confidence. Her intelligence and courage were all he trusted. They seemed to talk fast. We had Kidney Meridian, what was the other one? Triple Burner?
    Several, she was saying: Triple Burner a name only, more a relation, not a shape, between lungs, kidney…spleen, small intestine…organs that regulate water—old ideas, she said offhandedly like someone else, a person he could almost hear. (A mentor? The person in Boston?) They talked about China, Qi, the effect on it of organs it passed through. Passed near? Or through the neighborhood of? He needed somehow to see what we were talking about. He kept after her though because he had been mean about the African boy incident.
    “Have you seen your internist?” she said.
    He opened his eyes as she freed a needle, then another. His silence like gravity. What were his vertebrae to her? He knew some anatomy. (Did she really?) His disks, the tilt of his pelvic bone, his tail bone, his overly forward aiming neck bone. Yet his mind. He had seen forty operations, he thought.
    “What materials?” she said, and he was off like a fool. A material he told her about strong as steel, yet warmer feeling, adapted at great expense for a war museum for ultra-light roofing and siding that might move in the wind like aspens up the slope of a valley he knew in New Mexico—
    New Mexico—?
    This metal, it was even an element—titanium.
    “Ti tan ium,” she said, recalling something. Why had he thought she would drop him? It was the phone. His mind she did take an interest in. Skin-deep, deeper still. She’d probably heard of titanium for implants? “That too,” she said. His own dentist, she used it he happened to know, who